MUMBAI: Amazon Web Services said it was opening its first data centres in India, as the public cloud giant looks to boost growth in what is already one of its fastest growing markets.

Part of the ecommerce giant Amazon.com, the infrastructure-as-a-service division was started ten years ago. AWS, as it is normally called, is now on track to being a $10 billion annual business this year. It has an operating margin of over 24 per cent.

"In our conversations with our customers, it was clear that they wanted a region in the country either for reasons of lower latency or for data sovereignty. We think having a region in the country will significantly accelerate our growth," Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of AWS, told ET.

An AWS region can have multiple data centres, or what the company calls availability zones. Amazon's data centres in India are in Mumbai.

The Mumbai data centres will likely boost the amount of work AWS can do with banking and the healthcare sectors. Jassy said the company would also look to work the government on its Digital India initiatives.

Jassy, who was appointed CEO of infrastructure-as-service business in April, said 89 of the top 100 startups in India were hosted on AWS and that large companies like Tata Motors and Axis Bank also used the cloud platform. In total, 75,000 out of AWS' 1 million active customers are in India, he added.

AWS, which is the dominant player in the public cloud market, is just the latest company to set up data centres in the country. Microsoft has already set up data centres that will be used by its Azure public cloud market, so has IBM for its Softlayer public cloud. Google does not yet have data centres in the country.

Since its inception, AWS has also slashed the cost of its own offering. The company has cut its prices 51 times in the last eight years and often tells customers how they could reduce their spend on its services.

"We've saved 2 million customers about $350 million that would have spent on AWS. Which technology company do you know that would that and hurt their revenue? I don't think there are any," Jassy said.

He also had harsh words for the technology companies that AWS is in the process of disrupting.

"Technology companies have lost their will to innovate. They tend to acquire new technologies by buying other companies. Amazon has always been pioneering and we are very think for the long term," Jassy said.

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